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Meet the Author

Meet the Author: Katie Hutton

Katie Hutton

Katie Hutton is an Irish writer of historical fiction. The Gypsy Bride is her debut novel. It is available in Zaffre paperback for £7.99 or through Suffolk Libraries as an eBook and on our catalogue.

Who were your first literary heroes as you were growing up and when did you first realise you wanted to write?

I grew up reading. I was quite a solitary child but was never lonely when I had a book. The first book I can remember borrowing was Orlando the Marmalade Cat, from the public library in Carrickfergus, the town where I was born. I also had - still have - all the Beatrix Potter books on a little bookshelf my grandmother gave me; I reread them regularly even now. Then I progressed to Roger Lancelyn Green, Rosemary Sutcliffe, Henry Treece, Geoffrey Trease, Alan Garner, Cynthia Harnett…it’s not really a surprise that I now write mainly historical fiction.

At thirteen I read all of Thomas Hardy, then moved on to Jane Austen, the Brontës, George Eliot, and later, DH Lawrence and Graham Greene. When I was a small child I decided I wanted to live in a cottage and write books, though I don’t think I knew what kind of books. I didn’t do anything about it though until my thirties, and then got discouraged, had another go in my forties, got back down to it in my fifties finally and haven’t stopped since. I’d be terrified of a day without writing.

Can you give us a flavour of your new book The Gypsy Bride?

I wanted to write something rural. On my mother’s side I descend from people who were ‘Prims’, Primitive Methodists, an evangelical movement which united with mainstream Methodism in 1932. My great-great grandfather was a preacher on the Chinnor Circuit in Oxfordshire, and seems to have been rather fierce. The Prims were very active in early rural and mining trade unionism and were tireless providers of education through their Sunday Schools (most of their pupils were not Prims – they would educate any child or adult) prior to the 1870 Education Act. Then rummaging in an Oxfam bookshop I found WH Hudson’s A Shepherd’s Life (1910) and read the chapter on ‘the dark men of the village’.

These were the Gypsies, itinerant farm labourers moving across the country with the seasons. I was transfixed: I could see my heroine, from a close-knit, rooted, teetotal community, with all their emphasis on education, and her lover, who knew he was born in a field but didn’t know when his birthday was, illiterate, but with many gifts. And of course both their communities were dead-set against their relationship.

How did the characters of Sam and Ellen develop as you were writing and editing?

We are all individuals but nevertheless we are products of our upbringing. I do a great deal of research. I needed to know what Prims would do, say, or indeed read and think about. The Primitive Methodist Museum and Archive in Englesea Brook, near Alsager, was immensely helpful. I read a lot of ‘improving’ books written by Prims, sometimes for serialisation in their magazines, and novels with Prim characters (notably Arnold Bennett’s Clayhanger trilogy). Developing the character of Sam was initially more problematic, as much of what has been written about Gypsies, particularly at the time I am writing about, wasn’t actually written by Gypsies themselves.

I got a lot of help from a family of Kentish Gypsies, who were very kind and patient and answered endless questions. This stopped short of reading a draft, only because ‘we don’t read’, but they referred me to a retired professor of Romani studies who did. He put me right on a number of misconceptions that non-Gypsies have about what Gypsies do which gave me some absolute gifts for plot direction. I write at the same time as doing research; otherwise (as anybody who has done a research degree will know) there’s a real risk of going on ‘reading around’ forever and never getting anything down on paper.

What are the main components of a satisfying romantic novel? How much leeway do you have to change them if you want to go in another direction?

The definition of a romantic novel according to the Romantic Novelists Association is pretty broad, thankfully. For me, the setting needs to be compelling and vivid (for me, this would not be a millionaire with a yacht…yawn!) and the characters believable (which means they aren’t perfect human beings). Something, or someone (culture, upbringing, their own prejudice, family, some vengeful person from the past, some horrible experience of their own) needs to get in the way of their happiness, and their love becomes stronger as a result of overcoming that obstacle.

I think novelists now have quite a lot of leeway, but nevertheless need to be guided by what their agents and publishers see as being acceptable to their market. In an historical novel there is the added aspect of getting the context right, and not just in how people dressed or that they travelled in either third or first class railways carriages. Engaging in premarital sex, for instance, would be regarded in a very different manner in the 1930s than it was in the 1970s.

A question I have always wanted to ask. Why do you think librarians get such a hard time in romantic fiction?

In my experience none of them are prim and proper! I haven’t a clue! I used to be a library assistant, in public libraries (in Edinburgh) and in an academic library (in Durham), and I’m neither. Nor are my dear friends working in libraries in St Andrews, Durham or Stoke-on-Trent; I’ve dedicated a Kate Zarrelli novella to my St Andrews friend, and that book is certainly not for pearl-clutchers. I’m working on the sequel to The Gypsy Bride which is set mainly in 1950s Nottingham (pause for big shout out for the staff of the local history section in Nottingham Central Library), and have a supporting character who is a librarian (though the person he is based on is not). I give him his own love story, conducted in utter secrecy, as he is gay and homosexuality was yet to be decriminalised. Because of his eye for detail as a cataloguer, he is able to solve a problem for the police which delivers the heroine from danger.

Can you share anything about what you are working on at the moment?

I’m revising the sequel for The Gypsy Bride, currently called The Gypsy’s Daughter, and writing the first draft of a novel set on a farm in the Lake District and in Barrow-in-Furness in the aftermath of WW2. The hero is a German PoW and the heroine a Land Girl, and they are based on a couple I knew.

Have you ever read a book that changed your life or made you think differently?

There are a number. Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time is one. Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure is another, because access to education really shouldn’t be a privilege, and nobody should make moral judgements about other people’s relationships. EM Forster’s Passage to India about the entitlement of empire resonates for me because of where I was born.

Can you tell us one thing about yourself that your readers may not know?

I married the same man twice, once in a register office and ten years later in a quiet religious ceremony. My little boys accompanied me to the altar.